Walter Apai

Walter Apai, birth date unknown, is a Vancouver, British Columbia-based internet entrepreneur. He also represents himself publicly as a web designer, but there is no substantiation to that claim. He publishes two websites, http://www.techi.com, and http://www.webdesignerdepot.com, a tech news and opinion site, and a site about web design under the business name "Freestyle Networks Inc.", also from Vancouver, BC. He publicly credits the design of the first site to Matt Dempsey and the second to Radim Malinic.

Activities as a Web Publisher
On Monday, June 1st, 2010, a review of his site appeared on another website, called DesignM.ag. Techi.com Will Not Bore You was attributed to Brant Wilson, and filled with gushing praise about Techi.com, but bore a striking resemblance to a piece attributed to Walter himself, that ran on his own site:

However there was no mention at the beginning or anywhere within the article that it was a paid-for review or sponsored content. When contacted, the site owner, who was also the name on the byline, changed the article and added at the beginning: "Disclosure: This is a paid review, if you wish to purchase a paid review for your website (I have a 90% turn down ratio so if I turn you down don’t take it personally) contact us"

In email contact about the paid review, Mr. Wilson said “I don’t even know Walter… I’m trying to earn a living.” Nevertheless, the article included sentences like "I’m familiar with the guy behind this project and can honestly say he knows what he is doing."

Further research about WebdesignerDepot.com reveals that many sites have exactly the same sentence to describe it, word-for-word, which suggests paid placement to promote that site as well, and is exactly the same text on the site's Twitter Page "Webdesigner Depot is one of the most popular blogs about web design trends, tutorials and much more. It's run by Walter Apai, a web designer from Vancouver."

Response and Reaction
When a former writer for Techi.com noticed the paid review about Techi.com and wrote a blog post about it, The Trouble With Astroturf | Gillico Blog, Walter Apai became very upset and took several actions against the author. He first took down all of the author's previous work at Techi.com, then became very defensive and began posting responses to the article where he justified paid reviews as legal, and explained that he did not tell the review's author to write a favorable review. Walter Apai continued on to threaten the author of the blog post as being defamatory, and refused to provide any credentials to back up any experience as a web designer. He also tried to retroactively change the licensing on the blog post author's work, which is neither possible nor legal.

Walter Apai continues to operate on the web where he promotes himself as a legitimate, honest, ethical publisher and web designer, while he is none of these.